All the significant chapters of my life seem to come in fours. In four years, four grades, four seasons. Even things that are not meant to be in fours, like a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, end up as such. I have long accepted that I have no control over this—I merely ebb and flow in the rhythm that has been set for me by the universe.
Very importantly, something that comes every four years in perfect alignment with my cosmic cycle, is the release of Lorde albums. When Lorde released her Solar Power album in 2021, I was, dear lord, 17, which is an age you never stop being, the cusp of adolescence and adulthood that aches like an old injury whenever you let it rest for too long. I remember how that album pushed me to say yes to good things: blue hair dye, roller skating dates, long train rides to distant friends, letting go of sickening perfectionism.
And then, I remember losing it along the way, somewhere at the airport when I moved abroad, or perhaps when I let myself swoon over a man who couldn’t remember my birthday. Either way, with the next four year cycle coming to a close, I could already taste the fourth Lorde album coming up, and would say that I prophetically know it will give me the answers I need. All of my faith paid off when Virgin was released, and it offered the exact closure I was looking for.
The album consists of 11 tracks tied around the theme of transparency and rebirth, touching on the artist’s experiences with gender identity, overcoming an eating disorder, and grieving a long term relationship, focusing on the resulting strength and resilience. Despite repeated sexual references in its lyrics, the title of Virgin refers instead to the word’s original meaning, of a woman “one-in-herself”, calling on historic portrayals of women who were independent and strong in their own right.
Throughout the album, Lorde reiterates ideas of rebirth. In the first track, Hammer, she sings “I might have been born again / I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers”, setting the tone for the entire album. Virgin explores in depth the process of the songwriter relearning who she is in the aftermath of a brutal breakup, and much about the idea of rebirth and re-finding yourself ties back into cleaning up the related fallout.
This is succinctly addressed in What Was That, where Lorde writes “I wear smoke like a wedding veil / Make a meal I won’t eat”, calling back to a previous verse, “I remember saying then, ‘This is the best cigarette of my life’ / Well I want you just like that”. By conjuring the imagery of sitting covered in a cloud of smoke, under a veil, the songwriter proposes a powerful contrast – she tells the listener about the smoke from “best cigarettes” veiling the truth of what the relationship was like, and then ponders over that moment after the relationship ended, while mourning a phantom wedding veil that will never be worn.
Then, in Shapeshifter, Lorde shares her experience of the fleeting post-breakup rebound relationships, telling the listener how she’s been “the ice, [been] the flame”, “[been] the prize, the ball and chain”, and so forth, alluding to how she molds into the person her partner at the time wants her to be, without attaching to it – “Give ‘em nothing personal / So I’m not affected”. The push-and-pull she experiences in these relationships is reflected in the instrumental, composed cleverly in such a way that it gives off a feeling of swaying from side to side. She fights with the desire to be desired, “If I’m fine without it, why can’t I stop?”, and feels her younger self be embodied in the chase after affection, “I become her again / visions of a teenage innocence”. Ending on the idea of rebirth again, she says “I’ve been up on the pedestal / But tonight I just want to fall”, to despite the urge to seek solace in momentary companionship, decide to fall off, fall away, or worse, let herself fall in love again and become attached.
Strongly related to healing after a breakup, an ever-present string throughout Virgin is the persistent struggle with an eating disorder. This is already alluded to in What Was That, describing how the writer covers mirrors and “make[s] a meal [she] won’t eat”, but is explicitly explored in one of my favorite songs on the entire album, Broken Glass. The track is both masterfully written and produced, detailing the suffering entailed during the struggle, while complimented by a building melody which I can only describe as running through a field on a spring day after finally letting go of a long-term pain.
Lorde had spoken about recovering from an eating disorder in interviews before (citation), but is much more vulnerable on the matter in the lyrics of Broken Glass. She describes how her life quickly spiralled out of control, “I let myself get sucked in by arithmetic”, “Spent my summer getting lost in math”, and “Did I cry myself to sleep about that? / Cheat about that? Rot teeth about that? / Did I sweat hours a week about that?”, detailing how obsessive she had become over the numbers related to food and exercise to the point of self-destruction, specifically during the Solar Power era.
And, continuing with the theme of rebirth, she pleads to her past self to let go. From her recovered perspective, she has new insight on how she wishes she could’ve punched the mirror taking away her life’s energy and creativity, to “[…] make her see that this won’t last / It might be months of bad luck / But what if it’s just broken glass?” The years of reducing her life to numbers are allowed to come to a close — and if you’ve ever faced the same iron grip, screaming the lyrics to this song in the same bedroom you got sick in, might just be the final tick in favor of relinquishing it.
Continuing discussions of embodiment on Virgin, Lorde also divulges into her view of gender identity, which is alluded to in various tracks – e.g. “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man” on Hammer – but takes on a prominent role in Man of the Year and GRWM. The two songs serve as an antithesis to each other, with the former expressing her perceived notions of masculinity, and the latter, femininity. The songwriter revels in her feminine side by embracing imperfection, “Wide hips, tooth chipped, ‘96 / Skin scarred, looking forward”, and by humanizing it, avoids succumbing to cliched visions of femininity. In Man of the Year, she rejects the expectations of womanhood, and by choosing her own path of self-expression, offers herself a kind of love she cannot receive from another person – “Who’s gon’ love me like this?”. The track’s associated music video shows Lorde with duct tape across her chest, referring to finding a sense of masculinity in chest binding, and the song’s climax is disjointed, but clear – much like finding yourself.
The album, masterfully intertwining various complex themes of diverse love and loss embedded from song to song, reaches its climax and resolution in its closing track, David. If She Could See Me Now introduces this resolution, but it is on David that we hear Lorde’s final roar of condemnation to her past relationship and related suffering before the melody crackles and fizzles out, like embers of fire giving way to the phoenix. She grieves her past self being undermined both in the public eye and with her ex-partner, “Was I just someone to dominate?” or “Pure heroine mistaken for featherweight”, reckoning with how she gave everything and would have given more if she could, “I made you God ‘cause it was all I knew how to do”; “If I’d had virginity, I would’ve given it, too”.
The defining moment of betrayal, “‘Cause you dimmed me out when it got hard / Uppercut to the throat, I was offguard”, comes at the culmination of the hurt experienced in both the relationship and within herself, before giving way to the grief needed to move on – “Am I ever gonna love again?”. Throughout the song, the melody builds and falls similarly to the stages of grief, cycling through feelings of depression, denial, and anger, up until a buzzing, overwhelming peak representative of Lorde’s bargaining, before falling into calm right before the finish line of acceptance – “But what came spilling out that day was the truth / And once I could sing again, I swore I’d never let / Let myself sing again for you”. Even though this is not my favorite song off of the album, the sentiment of cycling through persistent grief, trying to forgive yourself for building pedestals for fantasies that ended before they ever started, rings painfully true.
The culmination of all the past hurt, inflicted by unsuitable lovers and expectations of self-expression and neatly memorized nutritional information, is being let go in the final beats of the album’s conclusion. Lorde, preaching not unlike a church choir, gives her audience the story of her struggles in full transparency, offering herself to be observed in all her colors; the same colors she regains in her detailed account of life after skinny love. Virgin’s four year- long gestation period was well worth the wait, tying off heartfelt lyricism with harmonious production, letting a story unfold from prologue to epilogue, and saluting to my latest four year chapter with tarot card precision once more. In listening to the album, I talk to its creator like an older sister, gossiping in our childhood bedrooms — I whisper confidential lists after prologues of don’t tell mom, but, and time and time again, she whispers back, I know. I understand. You will be okay. In four more years, I will believe her.
All the significant chapters of my life seem to come in fours. In four years, four grades, four seasons. Even things that are not meant to be in fours, like a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology, end up as such. I have long accepted that I have no control over this—I merely ebb and flow in the rhythm that has been set for me by the universe.
Very importantly, something that comes every four years in perfect alignment with my cosmic cycle, is the release of Lorde albums. When Lorde released her Solar Power album in 2021, I was, dear lord, 17, which is an age you never stop being, the cusp of adolescence and adulthood that aches like an old injury whenever you let it rest for too long. I remember how that album pushed me to say yes to good things: blue hair dye, roller skating dates, long train rides to distant friends, letting go of sickening perfectionism.
And then, I remember losing it along the way, somewhere at the airport when I moved abroad, or perhaps when I let myself swoon over a man who couldn’t remember my birthday. Either way, with the next four year cycle coming to a close, I could already taste the fourth Lorde album coming up, and would say that I prophetically know it will give me the answers I need. All of my faith paid off when Virgin was released, and it offered the exact closure I was looking for.
The album consists of 11 tracks tied around the theme of transparency and rebirth, touching on the artist’s experiences with gender identity, overcoming an eating disorder, and grieving a long term relationship, focusing on the resulting strength and resilience. Despite repeated sexual references in its lyrics, the title of Virgin refers instead to the word’s original meaning, of a woman “one-in-herself”, calling on historic portrayals of women who were independent and strong in their own right.
Throughout the album, Lorde reiterates ideas of rebirth. In the first track, Hammer, she sings “I might have been born again / I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers”, setting the tone for the entire album. Virgin explores in depth the process of the songwriter relearning who she is in the aftermath of a brutal breakup, and much about the idea of rebirth and re-finding yourself ties back into cleaning up the related fallout.
This is succinctly addressed in What Was That, where Lorde writes “I wear smoke like a wedding veil / Make a meal I won’t eat”, calling back to a previous verse, “I remember saying then, ‘This is the best cigarette of my life’ / Well I want you just like that”. By conjuring the imagery of sitting covered in a cloud of smoke, under a veil, the songwriter proposes a powerful contrast – she tells the listener about the smoke from “best cigarettes” veiling the truth of what the relationship was like, and then ponders over that moment after the relationship ended, while mourning a phantom wedding veil that will never be worn.
Then, in Shapeshifter, Lorde shares her experience of the fleeting post-breakup rebound relationships, telling the listener how she’s been “the ice, [been] the flame”, “[been] the prize, the ball and chain”, and so forth, alluding to how she molds into the person her partner at the time wants her to be, without attaching to it – “Give ‘em nothing personal / So I’m not affected”. The push-and-pull she experiences in these relationships is reflected in the instrumental, composed cleverly in such a way that it gives off a feeling of swaying from side to side. She fights with the desire to be desired, “If I’m fine without it, why can’t I stop?”, and feels her younger self be embodied in the chase after affection, “I become her again / visions of a teenage innocence”. Ending on the idea of rebirth again, she says “I’ve been up on the pedestal / But tonight I just want to fall”, to despite the urge to seek solace in momentary companionship, decide to fall off, fall away, or worse, let herself fall in love again and become attached.
Strongly related to healing after a breakup, an ever-present string throughout Virgin is the persistent struggle with an eating disorder. This is already alluded to in What Was That, describing how the writer covers mirrors and “make[s] a meal [she] won’t eat”, but is explicitly explored in one of my favorite songs on the entire album, Broken Glass. The track is both masterfully written and produced, detailing the suffering entailed during the struggle, while complimented by a building melody which I can only describe as running through a field on a spring day after finally letting go of a long-term pain.
Lorde had spoken about recovering from an eating disorder in interviews before (citation), but is much more vulnerable on the matter in the lyrics of Broken Glass. She describes how her life quickly spiralled out of control, “I let myself get sucked in by arithmetic”, “Spent my summer getting lost in math”, and “Did I cry myself to sleep about that? / Cheat about that? Rot teeth about that? / Did I sweat hours a week about that?”, detailing how obsessive she had become over the numbers related to food and exercise to the point of self-destruction, specifically during the Solar Power era.
And, continuing with the theme of rebirth, she pleads to her past self to let go. From her recovered perspective, she has new insight on how she wishes she could’ve punched the mirror taking away her life’s energy and creativity, to “[…] make her see that this won’t last / It might be months of bad luck / But what if it’s just broken glass?” The years of reducing her life to numbers are allowed to come to a close — and if you’ve ever faced the same iron grip, screaming the lyrics to this song in the same bedroom you got sick in, might just be the final tick in favor of relinquishing it.
Continuing discussions of embodiment on Virgin, Lorde also divulges into her view of gender identity, which is alluded to in various tracks – e.g. “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man” on Hammer – but takes on a prominent role in Man of the Year and GRWM. The two songs serve as an antithesis to each other, with the former expressing her perceived notions of masculinity, and the latter, femininity. The songwriter revels in her feminine side by embracing imperfection, “Wide hips, tooth chipped, ‘96 / Skin scarred, looking forward”, and by humanizing it, avoids succumbing to cliched visions of femininity. In Man of the Year, she rejects the expectations of womanhood, and by choosing her own path of self-expression, offers herself a kind of love she cannot receive from another person – “Who’s gon’ love me like this?”. The track’s associated music video shows Lorde with duct tape across her chest, referring to finding a sense of masculinity in chest binding, and the song’s climax is disjointed, but clear – much like finding yourself.
The album, masterfully intertwining various complex themes of diverse love and loss embedded from song to song, reaches its climax and resolution in its closing track, David. If She Could See Me Now introduces this resolution, but it is on David that we hear Lorde’s final roar of condemnation to her past relationship and related suffering before the melody crackles and fizzles out, like embers of fire giving way to the phoenix. She grieves her past self being undermined both in the public eye and with her ex-partner, “Was I just someone to dominate?” or “Pure heroine mistaken for featherweight”, reckoning with how she gave everything and would have given more if she could, “I made you God ‘cause it was all I knew how to do”; “If I’d had virginity, I would’ve given it, too”.
The defining moment of betrayal, “‘Cause you dimmed me out when it got hard / Uppercut to the throat, I was offguard”, comes at the culmination of the hurt experienced in both the relationship and within herself, before giving way to the grief needed to move on – “Am I ever gonna love again?”. Throughout the song, the melody builds and falls similarly to the stages of grief, cycling through feelings of depression, denial, and anger, up until a buzzing, overwhelming peak representative of Lorde’s bargaining, before falling into calm right before the finish line of acceptance – “But what came spilling out that day was the truth / And once I could sing again, I swore I’d never let / Let myself sing again for you”. Even though this is not my favorite song off of the album, the sentiment of cycling through persistent grief, trying to forgive yourself for building pedestals for fantasies that ended before they ever started, rings painfully true.
The culmination of all the past hurt, inflicted by unsuitable lovers and expectations of self-expression and neatly memorized nutritional information, is being let go in the final beats of the album’s conclusion. Lorde, preaching not unlike a church choir, gives her audience the story of her struggles in full transparency, offering herself to be observed in all her colors; the same colors she regains in her detailed account of life after skinny love. Virgin’s four year- long gestation period was well worth the wait, tying off heartfelt lyricism with harmonious production, letting a story unfold from prologue to epilogue, and saluting to my latest four year chapter with tarot card precision once more. In listening to the album, I talk to its creator like an older sister, gossiping in our childhood bedrooms — I whisper confidential lists after prologues of don’t tell mom, but, and time and time again, she whispers back, I know. I understand. You will be okay. In four more years, I will believe her.
